Your male gaze is shining bright; your female characters are quirky yet sexy; and your female characters’ breasts are characters in their own right. Sound familiar? Before you hit send on draft #1 of your manuscript, consider: could there be a draft #2? #3? Even #7? If you want to get published in a world where women are allowed to read and comment, then the answer should be a resounding “yes.”
To that end, here are some writing tips.
Use your word processor’s search function to find the following words: jugs, cans, melons, cantaloupes, nips, tits, titties, tatas, tig’ol biddies, big naturals, dirty pillows, cones, globes, and orbs. Replace each with the word “breasts.”
Cross out all adjectives that describe female characters’ appearance. Those include but are not limited to: hot, sexy, smoking, ugly, petite, fat, really ugly, chunky, slim, fuckable, unfuckable, and lithe.
If, after all this, there are no adjectives left, then write some new ones. Try the adjectives you used to describe the male characters; could those be applied to women? Many descriptors unrelated to appearance can be applied to non-males, like intelligent, funny, sardonic, thoughtful, zesty, capable, famished, tired, overworked, managerial (who knew?), etc.
Delete all instances of the word “shrill.” Search for similar words spanning all parts of speech: shriek, nag, scream, screech, and squawk, for example. Looking for a replacement word? How about “said,” “asked,” or “noted,” without adjectives attached? Remember that women often say things without conveying heightened emotion in their tone.
Delete any part of any scene where the one female character loses her virginity and has a thirteen-minute orgasm. (If your genre is fantasy, feel free to ignore this tip.)
Read Gone Girl. Now that you know that a “cool girl” is a carefully curated persona and not someone who occurs in nature, remove the cool girl from your novel. Imagine other types of female characters: the socially anxious woman who wonders how many people hate her but is working on her cognitive distortions; the woman who’s great at her job as a food chemist; the woman who was laid off and that’s her biggest problem—not that she’s single at thirty-six. (Feel free to apply this to your real-life romantic and platonic relationships as well.)
If there is a scene where a woman acts “irritable” and then menstruates, delete it. Ditto any scene where a menstruating woman eats an entire carton of Ben & Jerry’s and a jumbo bag of Cheetos while watching a reality dating show and sobbing into the red wine she’s drinking straight from the bottle. Ditto the scene where she throws a glass at the wall and misses your male protagonist’s head by an inch. Actually, just delete all mentions of menstruation from your manuscript and future conversations with anyone and everyone.
Cut any scene where your protagonist has sex with his child’s nurse or preschool teacher or French au pair.
Read any book by Judy Blume. Any book at all. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret recently came out as a film. Blubber and Forever will do just as well. This may or may not help you with your writing, but all the women in your life will appreciate it.
Is your female character “hungry” for your male protagonist’s “giant, throbbing cock”? No, she’s not. Eliminate the word “throbbing” from your vocabulary, unless a character or you have a headache. (A penis is not a headache.)
Has a female character been “sullied” by another man’s touch? Is your male protagonist enraged but ultimately forgiving “as long as I’m the only one to pleasure you for the rest of your life?” Is he portrayed as a hero? Delete.
Is your novel written from the perspective of a woman? Start over.
Is your protagonist “Holden Caulfield at age forty-five”? Start over.
Do you describe your writing style as “David Lynch meets Larry David”? Fuck off.
Reverse the genders of all your characters. Consider genders other than The Big Two. If you find yourself thinking, “But a man would never behave so erratically as to throw a glass at his woman,” pause. Rethink your character descriptions and how you implicitly use pronouns to convey ownership over all women, fictional and actual.
Read through your manuscript and identify scenes that were informed by Pornhub. Edit these scenes out, unless this is a screenplay for Pornhub.
Go to therapy. Remove all scenes where your protagonist has sex with his therapist. Don’t weaponize therapy in your writing, your email exchanges, or disagreements.
Probably retitle your manuscript. Examples of titles to rethink (this list is not exhaustive):
- My Magnum Opus
- Magnum Opus
- Magnum
- Of Mice and Manly Men
- The Penis of Wrath
- The Penis
- Penis
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